>We're going to have supervision. Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there's a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on.
-Larry Ellison
This has been the plan of the oligarchs for a while.
Property crime skyrocketed during COVID largely because of intentional decisions around policing. We can easily police property crime without ubiquitous surveillance.
Most Americans know that a small reduction in property crime is not worth trading for constant surveillance by private corporations and the entire government.
This feels very similar to the “abolish the police” rhetoric we heard during the George Floyd stuff.
I’m genuinely curious about what your opinion actually means here. If we abolish ICE are you saying that we should never deport anyone? If someone manages to sneak across the border they have a right to live here forever?
I'm saying we dismantle the sprawling security state that was built in the early aughts and replace it with something fair and humane. I'm not arguing to stop deportations. I'd prefer a far more humane, carefully considered set of policies — we don't need masked thugs in the streets killing civilians, we don't need camps and detention centers operated by private companies profiting off of human suffering.
That doesn't look like an absolute stop to deportations, it does look like a stop to the madness and cruelty of the current administration and its supporters.
Deportations occurred before ICE and deportations can occur after ICE is dissolved. I'm genuinely curious at your questions. Do you believe people could just sneak across the border and live in United States forever before ICE existed, and that it somehow stopped with the formation of ICE?
I’m genuinely curious whether you've heard of the concept of a false dichotomy.
Australia has no ICE and yet somehow manages to deport people.
Perhaps it's less about the deportations of those that are genuinely evading the system and more about the deportations of those who have engaged with the pipeline, pay taxes, and still get shot by the masked thugs of Gregory Bovino who's too busy larping as a Nazi in a trenchcoat to pay heed to regular US laws.
>Perhaps it's less about the deportations of those that are genuinely evading the system
Hudreds of thousands of illegal immigrants have been deported and border crossings are near an all time low. The rest of your post is "everyone I don't like is a Nazi."
Compare pictures of Australian Border Force to the US ICE - pretty clear differences - name tags and a lack of durags across the face are obvious differences, death rate directly at the hands of the ABF is another.
I restate to be clear, Australia has a law abiding border force subject to Federal and State laws, whereas the US has ICE, an unchecked lawless throwback to the death squads of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, Soviet as well as Nazi, and from attempts to replace the rule of law with personal tyranny.
> The rest of your post is "everyone I don't like is a Nazi."
Please don't strawman and make things up, it's a bald fact that Greg Bovino loves his Nazi trenchcoats, at no point did I claim anyone else was a Reichophiliac.
My apologies if I touched a nerve, I know little of how you might choose to cosplay in your own private life.
Pretty telling how you somehow seem to conflate deporting people who have no documentation, and committing human right abuses, sending people to their death, murdering US citizens, recruiting racists and alt-right extremists, and anyone. Improperly training agents, racial profiling. Abolishing an organization that engages in those things is a "rhetoric" to you. You clearly don't have any problem with any those things, the only thing you care about, is well, deporting those "illegals".
There’s an obvious difference between the two: having a baby is not the same as giving away an organ.
Humans have a finite number of organs which they need to live. You are selling a finite resource and doing so has concrete drawbacks for the seller.
Having a baby does not give up anything. It is a win-win. Surrogates in the US are asked if they are done personally having children. The agency won’t let someone be a surrogate (usually) unless they affirm they are done having children of their own.
As an aside: a highly regulated market for organs would probably be a net positive for society. It would increase the total supply of organs and decrease demand for black market organ harvesting. It would almost certainly save many lives every year.
> Having a baby does not give up anything. It is a win-win.
I had a son recently -- everything indeed went fine, but my wife and I did read up on both the risks and the permanent changes to women's bodies that having a child brings. Among other things, a C-section is not recommended an unlimited number of times, and it is classified as a surgical procedure for a reason.
You can pay somebody to get a biological child that you cannot have, but at the same time you are paying them to carry some risk for you within their bodies and possibly undergo surgery for you. I am not anti-surrogacy myself, but it just is not that simple as a win-win.
My point is not about risk, my point is about giving up something which you cannot get back. Most surrogacy pregnancies don’t need C-sections and are normal uncomplicated births. The surrogate receives money + other benefits and can continue to live a normal healthy life with no change to her wellbeing after she gives birth.
If you are talking about risk, many transactions in life carry some risk. Your Uber Eats driver risks his life getting in the car or motorbike to bring you your Chipotle burrito. An oil rig worker daily risks heavy machinery injury in exchange for money. We accept that consenting adults are capable of accepting some risk.
Additionally: agencies do everything they can to mitigate medical risks as well. Intended parents are required to purchase good medical insurance for the surrogate if they don’t have any.
Hm. I can empathize with your perspective, as there's definitely an emotional connection which develops over the course of a pregnancy. But the child being "a part of the mother's soul", making surrogacy "worse than selling a kidney" is a highly subjective belief.
If we ban the sale of things that are "a part of [someone]'s soul", how do we adjudicate what is a legitimate part of someone's soul? For example, many people consider their creative works to be part of their souls, and I don't think anyone can objectively disprove this idea. If you invest years into anything, it will shape and affect you just as much as you affect it.
These same people would have no problem with women having an abortion up to the day of birth, but if a woman wants to voluntarily have someone else’s baby, it’s unethical?
The motivation here seems mostly like a vague disgust at the concept rather than any concrete criticism of the system’s implementation.
>I’m not sure the U.S. model is the right one, but what it needs is some regulation. It looks too much like a free market. It looks like livestock trading.
Surrogates are treated incredibly well throughout the entire process. Not only do they make a large amount of money, but they are often showered with gifts throughout the process. Insurance is purchased for them if they don’t already have it.
The entire process takes up to a year of bureaucracy, medical screenings, and planning.
There’s nothing exploitative about the implementation of surrogacy in the United States. I say this as someone who is intimately familiar with the process.
> These same people would have no problem with women having an abortion up to the day of birth,
Do these people exist anywhere outside of your convenient rhetoric? Do you follow them individually and cross reference their opinions from one issue to another?
I have met many people in the US who have this opinion, absolutely. Even on this site you can find them easily. Heck some of my own family hold this opinion!
I don’t really care about abortion as an issue, I am simply making the point that the people who wrote this article would probably make two contradictory arguments: “My body my choice” and also “my body but NOT my choice because this choice is icky and it looks too much like a free market”.
I believed this at one point as well, but that’s not happening anymore. Tesla became what it is while leaning on generous electric car rebates that drastically reduced prices of their cars (especially when leasing), not to mention the millions in carbon credits that other car makers paid to it that was basically another subsidy. Then once Tesla achieved economies of scale and paid off the early fixed costs, he no longer supported subsidies for electric vehicles. That’s pretty classic pull-up-the-ladder-behind-you behavior. The net effect is a drop in overall electric car growth and the scaling back of electric car development by many of Tesla’s competitors.
His competitors already have economies of scale, they are incumbent carmakers that build tens of millions of cars every year.
Volkswagen has a market cap of 40B, why do they need to government subsidies to build a new car?
If you truly care about wide-scale EV adoption above all else, why not advocate for opening up western markets to Chinese EVs? The availability of a 10k EV would do far more for adoption than giving taxpayer money to billion dollar megacorps.
The USA has gone from 90% white -> 50% in one generation. Social trust is rapidly declining as a result. Just like South Africa, which is the global epicenter of low-trust crimes like copper theft, we are seeing a rise in these types of crimes.
The poorest Americans do actually have free healthcare (medicaid). It currently covers 40% of all children in the US and generally covers the bottom 25% of Americans. In places like California and New York the state level benefits are even better and apply regardless of immigration status (illegals get free healthcare).
> The USA has gone from 90% white -> 50% in one generation.
This is factually incorrect. The USA hasn't been "90% white" since the 1950s (and even then, you have to count hispanic as white to make the numbers work). It is also still >50% white by pretty much any definition (the 50% claim is based only on children under 18, and requires excluding hispanic from the category).
That is, if I'm being incredibly generous, 75 years (nearly 4 generations) to go from ~90% to ~50%. Not one generation.
Download the CSV and search for things like "Latinx" or "Black" or "equity" or "URM" (URM = non-white)
>CHS: Large: Collaborative Research: Gender-Inclusive Open Source through Gender-Inclusive Tools
>This work will harness foundational gender research to provide theory-based yet practical solutions, towards addressing the underrepresentation of women in OSS communities.
>The AGEP Florida Alliance Model: Improving Minority Women Success in STEM Faculty Careers
>The research team is also investigating ways that URM women in STEM build skills, knowledge and competencies to successfully enter and persist in faculty careers.
>STEM Leadership, Equity, and Advancement for Faculty
>The NSF ADVANCE program is designed to foster gender equity through a focus on the identification and elimination of organizational barriers
Most of these are pure racism and absolutely deserved to be revoked.
Taxpayer money being used for race-based and gender-based "research".
"fostering gender equity" is not even science, trying to equate these grants with something like researching fundamental physics or chemistry is disingenuous.
The NSF's focus areas do include research on people and society, as well as development of new training and education initiatives (https://www.nsf.gov/focus-areas/education) and fostering a robust STEM workforce (https://www.nsf.gov/focus-areas/workforce). Not every grant issued by the NSF needs to be geared towards fundamental scientific research; the NSF's mission is broad, and intentionally so.
>to promote the progress of science, to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare, and to secure the national defense
Equity and diversity initiatives are almost always blatantly racist and discriminatory by definition. They are also rife with ethnic favoritism and ingroup collusion.
Giving taxpayer money to people to "foster gender equity" by definition means you are giving money to try and advantage one group of people based on immutable characteristics (gender).
I find it telling that many of the people who lampoon these cuts make a point to never actually talk about the specific grants themselves, but like to keep the discussion at a higher level and discuss how "scientists" are going to leave in droves to go study in Europe instead of the USA.
>Examining Undergraduate Research Experiences of Latinx STEM Students in Research Intensive HSIs and Emerging-HSIs
>[this project] will undertake a comparative study of undergraduate research experiences for Latinx students at Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) using an asset-based framework and Chicana/Latina feminist epistemology and the "platicas methodology"
If you went on CNN and discussed how funding is being cut for "comparitive studies using feminist epistemolgy", the majority of Americans would be fine with it. In fact a huge portion of Americans would likely say that cutting these types of grants actually advances the NSF's mission statement by cutting out racist and divisive programs that center on specific ethnic groups.
You complained that they funded things that weren't science. I said "how it limits the scope of the agency to doing science." and you went off about how you don't like things.
The mission statement is not limited to doing science, which is the misrepresentation you tried to make.
God forbid we figure out the best way for the smartest and most talented people of all backgrounds to contribute to science. Why take diamonds from the rough when you can just leave them there instead?
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